Partnership and Race in Mission Encounters in Tanzania

• Authors: Elaine Elisabeth Christian
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

I examine racial and ethnic dynamics in encounters between Tanzanian church personnel, and visiting American partners or short-term missionaries. Contemporary mission work in Tanzania is situated within a historical context that includes, but is not ultimately determined by, race or ethnicity. Several kinds of engagements and partnerships exist between American religious organisations and the Tanzanian church, which I describe ethnographically, and discuss how encounters between Tanzanian Christians and American visitors become ethnically inflected. Two cases-encounters with Maasai and Chagga people respectively-provide a comparative illustration. Finally, I address the role played by new types of partnership between Tanzanian and American religious organisations, and how themes of hospitality and identities as guests and hosts contribute to encounters between American and Tanzanian Christians. In these encounters, multiple areas of shifting meanings of race come together, resulting in disjunctures of understanding. I suggest that these disjunctures, coupled with the guest-host dynamic and the lack of in-depth knowledge characteristic of short-term mission in general, reveal patterns of social inequality and tensions inherent in the changing context of Christian mission.

Keywords

EN

Tanzania; Christianity; short-term mission; hospitality; ethnicity

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Theology
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2016-01-30

accepted

2016-06-28

online

2016-08-12

Contributors

author

Elaine Elisabeth Christian

• Columbia University Teachers College, New York, USA

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opth-2016-0058